The mystery of being

Whether she embroidered the blouse when it was already made or covered the fabric in flowers before it became the blouse, I will never know. Whether she traced the pattern first onto the fabric by hand or used a ready-made one designed by someone else and ironed on to follow with her stitches, I will never know. 

My mother wore the blouse when she was a young woman full of hope and confidence. She wore it in the warmer weather or on colder days under a cardigan. Tulip shaped, the blouse came in at the waist and held the texture of many wavering stitches throughout. In reds and yellows and greens, a swirling pattern that evoked the majesty of medieval palaces and the simplicity of the countryside. The majesty of flowers.

My mother on the left, mid 1940s on a rooftop with family and friends, enjoying the summer sun. The blouse in view.

The one item of clothing she kept from her younger days, this blouse travelled across the sea from the Netherlands to Australia and wound up in the back of her wardrobe where my older sister in later years found and squirrelled it away, for fear of moths eating into the fine stitches. Moths or whatever other thread eating creatures might invade this once glorious blouse

For a long time my sister had plans to resurrect the blouse, to bring it back to life, fit for purpose, but when she looked closely, she saw the tears in the fabric, the frayed edges along the central seams, were too far gone to turn it into a blouse once more. She would need to cut away too much fabric before the blouse could fit even a small child, if it was to stay as it was intended. 

She decided instead to cut out panels of the embroidered material and surround them in gold embossed picture frames as a memento of our mother. 

She had enough for several such pictures and distributed them among those siblings who were prepared to pay the cost of the framing. 

It seems a strange piece of artwork to hang from my wall. Like a relic of the cloth Veronica used when she approached Jesus on his way to crucifixion. Veronica took her white shawl and wiped the sweat and blood off Jesus’s brow and the image of his torn and weary face was imprinted there for evermore.  The famed shroud of Turin. 

When I was a child I loved this story. I can’t say why now. It has lost its thrill to intrigue me. I doubt the authenticity of the actual shroud hanging somewhere in Italy, but the idea of miracles stays with me, muted. 

My mother believed in miracles. My mother believed that bad could be made good, miraculously. Through prayer, through the intervention of the saints. 

I shared this belief as a child. The hopeful optimism that bad things could become good in an instant because God or the saints wanted it so. 

I have no truck with miracles anymore, though I have great respect for mystery. For the unfathomable events that happen every day, the rich complexity of them all. If we explore these mysteries for a long time, they might  become clearer to us, but we might never in our lifetimes get to the bottom of the whys and how. 

The stuff of evolution, the stuff of why we’re here, the stuff of whether we human beings are alone in the universe or whether there are others whom we can anthropomorphise into beings like us, including plants and animals, or whether we are as unique as we like to think we are. 

The mystery of being. 

Ease your way out of love

Because I lost the green notebook in which I kept the thoughts of my adolescent self, I do not have a record of my early written words. Only a memory of sitting in the back of the chapel at the convent school where I spent six years from the time I was twelve until I turned eighteen and on those pages I journaled my interiority. 

Those passions of a young and gawky fifteen-year-old who fell in love with a teacher. One who wore a habit of black after taking her vows to become a Faithful Companion of Jesus, when she was still a young woman, not much older than I was then. 

I did not long to touch her or be touched by her, I longed only to be near her, to be in her presence, to hear her voice, to receive her words written on slips of paper which she passed onto me after I had sent my first messages to her during the holidays when I could not see her at school.

This then was my first foray into letter writing. My first attempt to put my hand into that of another and share my innermost thoughts in the hope of a warm response. 

The nun wrote back letters and over time they held greater weight. They came to feel as if she had me in her mind but when my younger sister a year behind me at school began to fall in love with my favourite teacher, too, something began to sour. By the time I left the school with its green garden beds and high fences to keep out the sooty factories of Richmond and hide the smells from the brewery further up the Yarra River and close to the city, I had eased my way out of this love.

It is best to ease your way out of love. Best to let the glowing warmth in your heart, the hope and desire to be with another, fade away into a trickle of affection that barely lights your sky at night, rather than hold fast to the deep pain of lost love. 

Or so it was for me with this teacher, nun, young woman who first taught me desire beyond the passions I once felt for my mother.

I am wary of the word love, of the depth of its charge. I use it freely to mark an affection for others whom I hold close, but the passions I once felt as a child and adolescent, as a young woman. When I feel for a young moon-faced man who tended to heaviness and walked with an easy restlessness, as if those two opposites could co-exist. Those loves have bypassed me. Filtered down to something gentler, more centred on the ground of the familial and of friendship. 

Loretta Smith was three years older than me but despite the disparity in our ages she became my friend. She lived with her huge family in a ramshackle house at the end of our street and held the distinction of being in the girl guides. She urged me to join and after much pleading my mother relented. My mother did not object to her daughter joining such a movement given various of my brothers had taken to the boy scouts over the years, but she baulked at the cost of the unform. Still I had to have it.

There were no hand-me-downs available from my older sister. who took no interest in the guides. No one among my mother’s extended family who could hand over the clothes their daughters had outgrown. 

I was the first girl in my family to join the guides. Once a week after dinner I walked with Loretta who collected me from my front door. Down the hill on Canterbury Road and through Shierlaw Avenue to the scout hall, a rectangular weatherboard box with large double front doors on top of which the words: Canterbury Scouts and the Fleur de Lys. 

My skirt and blouse were crisp with their newness, something I had not known before. In my family new clothes belonged only to firstborns. And the pleasure I felt was soon offset by a chafing sense of guilt when I remembered my mother’s unease in the Girl Guide shop in the city when she looked at the price tags she needed in order to be properly fitted out. She’d been a cub mistress herself in her youth and maybe hankered vicariously to relive those days.

A cub mistress (not my mother) wedding from pre-war days. girl scouts

A year later when my younger sister wanted to join me and Loretta the thought of buying another such uniform again for me as my sister could take over my, by then, too small uniform, was too much for my mother. And too much for me. 

What is it with younger siblings admiring us so much they want to do exactly as we do and then we’re left with a sense that our achievements are taken from us, or so it was for me. My favourite nun, my girl guides and later still a boyfriend. 

But I did not factor in the way my sister paved the way for me with some of her friends. That because we were only one year apart at school, because we were thrown in together in our family as the little girls, we spent hours of time together and formed the closest bond imaginable.

Why do these bonds fray? Why do these loves go cold? Why not endure the test of time?